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HAVANA, Cuba, Aug 15 (ACN) The Cuban Academy of Sciences (ACC) will tomorrow award the Corresponding Member distinction to the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003, the American biologist and university professor Peter Courtland Agre.

Sergio Jorge Pastrana, director general of the institution, told the ACN that the distinction will be granted in a ceremony in the Paraninfo of the ACC, where a delegation from that country that attended only a few days ago an international event at the Institute Of Tropical Medicine Pedro Kouri (IPK) will be present.

Under the auspices of the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO / WHO), the XV International Dengue Course at the IPK was held from 7 to 18, with priority given to the co-circulation of Zika and Chikungunya, mosquito-borne diseases Aedes aegypti.

In March, Cuban academics adopted the decision to award this category, dedicated to non-resident experts in the island who have made a significant contribution to scientific development, to the American scholar.

With the addition of Agre, there are 29 corresponding scholars from 19 countries listed in the ACC, according to Jorge Pastrana.Also on the list of foreign members of the ACC are Professor of Physiology, Biophysics and Psychiatry at the University of Illinois (Chicago) Mark Rasenick, and the chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Vatican, Monsignor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo.

Agre, who visited Cuba on several occasions, also received an honorary plaque in 2015 for the 280th anniversary of the founding of the University of Havana, in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the field of science.

The American researcher, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, received the Nobel Prize for his contribution in the discovery of aquaporin, an integral protein that forms part of the pores of the cell membrane and which is permeable to water.

At present, Agre (Northfield, Minnesota, January 30, 1949) is the director of the Institute of Malaria Research at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Maryland.